Luca Ferrari

There are so many factors and variables that even if you're a genius and you work your ass off, the stars will probably not align for you anyway.

Whereas at the same time, we also found that our skills at all the functional things like software engineering, AI at the time for what it's worth, product design, product management, marketing, although they were still pretty...

accrued three years later.

They were night and day relative to when we started.

We were on a clear path to, I'd like to think, excellence.

And so we thought being really good at the functional knowledge and skills necessary to run a digital business is probably a matter of, if you're assuming you are reasonably talented, a matter of perseverance, effort,

discipline.

We can bet on that.

We don't want to bet our entrepreneurial lives on getting lucky.

So why don't we try to be excellent at the functional things and then buy businesses from people who maybe got lucky or they're very good, but also the passions change between going from zero to one to two, two to 10, like it's a different job.

And so maybe there are very talented people who have gotten far.

They're just a little bit fed up with it.

They're not interested in running the next phase of it.

We should be able to find situations where it's a great deal for both parties because of these factors.

That turned out to be true.

And now in hindsight, 12 years later, there is a lot more to it.

There are structural advantages in integrating different businesses under the same roof.

But at the time, we didn't have that insight, which today is probably more important than what I just described.

But what we had identified was enough to drive some level of success for the first maybe five or six years.

I'll give you an obvious one and two not so obvious ones.